Mobile devices are currently in wide use. Mobile devices include such things as cellular telephones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, multi-media players, other handheld and palmtop devices, and slate or tablet computers, to name a few. In mobile devices, battery life conservation is often addressed.
One way of addressing battery life conservation deals with the management of applications that are open on the mobile device. In particular, lifecycle management takes place in a scenario where the user opens an application and then navigates away from that application but does not expressly or explicitly close the application before navigating away. For instance, the user may open up a customer relations management application, and then momentarily navigate away from that application by opening another application, such as a contact list directory. When the user navigates away from the customer relations manager application, operating systems can handle the lifecycle management of the application that the user navigated away from, in different ways.
Due to battery lifecycle and memory management concerns, some operating systems may have simply killed the initial application (or closed it). However, this can present a number of problems. For instance, when the user eventually navigates back to the application, and the operating system re-launches the application, then the entire user interface information (such as the control values displayed on a page of the application) is lost.
In other words, when the user initially opened the application, the user may have entered user interface state information or control values into various controls. Such values can include, for example, checking or unchecking a check box, configuring a radio button, scrolling to a certain point in a scrollable list, among other things. When the user subsequently navigates away from the application, the operating system may simply kill the application. Therefore, when the user subsequently navigates back to the application, even though the operating system re-launches the application at that time, all of the user interface control states and values and other user interface state information for the displayed page are lost. Thus, the user is not coming back to the application in the exact same state it was in when the user left it. This does not leave the user's experience seamless and would require the user to navigate back in the application to the same place and re-enter all desired control values and state information which is undesirable and cumbersome.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.